Ohio State English Department has Strong Presence in Recent PMLA
Ohio State faculty and alumni contributed three articles to the most recent issue of PMLA (January 2008, Vol 123, No. 1), making the Ohio State English Department the most well-represented department in the issue. The three publications continue the trend of the department's work being well-received by what is arguably the profession's most prestigious journal. PMLA, produced by the Modern Language Association of America, publishes scholarly essays and is sent to over 2,300 libraries around the world, as well as about 30,000 professors and instructors at the college level.
The January 2008 issue contains an essay by 2002 Ohio State Ph.D. graduate Melissa Ianetta, "‘She Must Be a Rare One:' Aspasia, Corinne, and the Improvisatrice Tradition." Ionetta's essay develops a theory of rhetorical improvisation through a reading of Plato's Menaxenus, and then applies that to Germaine de Stael's novel, Corinne. Ianetta is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delaware, and serves as director of writing.
Karen Leick's "Popular Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Daily Press" looks at the national conversation that took place around modernist writing in the 1920s, even when published in small magazines, and posits that modernist writing was better known and more popular than is commonly believed. Leick is an Assistant Professor of American modernism and twentieth century literature at Ohio State.
James Phelan's "Narratives in Context; or, Another Twist in the Narrative Turn" asserts that the study of narrative is an increasingly interdisciplinary venture, and that that venture can be approached by studying narratives in the context of the "contest" of alternative narratives that one often finds in other disciplines including, but not limited to, politics and law. Phelan is Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State, and works primarily on the rhetorical theory of narrative.
Other faculty have published in the journal in recent years, including Wendy Hesford, Associate Professor of rhetoric, who published "Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies " in May 2006; David Herman, Professor and director of Project Narrative, who published "Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology" in 1997; and Brenda Brueggemann, Associate Professor of rhetoric and composition, who published "Deaf, She Wrote: Mapping Deaf Women's Autobiography" in March 2005.
"PMLA is indeed the flagship journal of the discipline" said Richard Dutton, Humanities Distinguished Professor in the English Department, "and to have so much representation in it from so many of our faculty and alums is a real mark of our impact at the highest levels."
